How to Promote Your Business Online

Surely you want your current customers or clients to easily find your contact information, don’t you? You can also make it easier for them to find out what hours you’re open, what you sell, and how to find your Web site. Even your best customers could lose your phone number or not have it handy when they need it or want to share it with others!

Do you want more business? Even if you are plenty busy now, how will the economy affect the ability of your existing customers to continue paying you? If you get more requests than you can handle, you can always schedule them for later or refer them elsewhere.

The first step to increasing your business is by raising your visibility online. We’ll start with the many high traffic free directories. They already have huge numbers of visitors using them to find businesses – especially local businesses.

Knowing where to list and quickly navigating to each site’s submission page saves time. Most sites ask for similar data so instead of duplicating your efforts we provide a form to help you gather all the information you’ll be using. Some submission sites have short timeout values which cause you to lose your work so being prepared avoids the frustration of repeating your work.

Listing your site is fairly easy – usually. Doing it well takes a little planning and reaps far better results. We’ve created a step-by-step process to make it faster and easier. While you may be tempted to just jump in without this preparation, read the step descriptions and you’ll see why it is best to use this process.

Start submitting. Be sure to record the date of each submission on the spreadsheet.

Using the spreadsheet, go back and confirm that each listing is live and correct.

With this process you can increase your online visibility, receive more visitors to any online presence you have, and generate more sales, leads, appointments or subscribers.

Use the spreadsheet to add and track more and more listings as time allows. Take advantage of a few minutes here or there or extended slow periods to invest in yourself. Some listings take time to go live so list before you “need” the business. This is especially true if your business is seasonal or being affected by the economy.

If you anticipate a slow period coming up, consider recruiting someone else to do this for you right away. This someone could be a professional with copywriting experience or You could provide the gathered data, all-important descriptions, and tracking spreadsheet to someone and let them do the submissions. Be sure to confirm the listings yourself, or have them do the confirming if you trust them.

Looking for a new way to make a living or help others? Learn this process and offer your services to those who don’t have the time or desire to learn it themselves.